14 DAY TRIAL // With Amalga Life Sciences, Microsoft attempts to bridge disparate research IT systems into a network that streamlines access to information. The Redmond company's vision involves the transformation of disconnected data into knowledge, and apply the latter to personalized treatments. Amalga Life Sciences is built to handle both healthcare and life science research data and brings to the table new storage capabilities, complemented by a semantic query environment and ontology management functionality. At the Bio-IT World Conference & Expo, the software giant also revealed that Amalga Life Sciences delivered a next-generation reasoning engine “Concept Browser” that was set up to work with Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) ontology.
“The current nature of multidisciplinary research and operating models has led to a research IT landscape that lacks seamless integration and extensibility of data, expresses clinical knowledge inconsistently, and operates on incomplete biological knowledge described by different research contexts,” explained Jim Karkanias, senior director of applied research and technology, Microsoft Health Solutions Group. “At its core, Amalga Life Sciences is designed to overcome these issues and enable research organizations to implement new models of research and development for personalized medicine.”
Microsoft explained that the Amalga Life Sciences Concept Browser was capable of allowing users to find connections between concepts based on ontological criteria. In this manner, researchers would be able to analyze the connection between concepts as well as the relationships built inherently. Microsoft Amalga Life Sciences had already been embraced by researchers, the Redmond company emphasized, offering Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center as an example of an adopter.
“Our researchers face an overwhelming challenge to collect, analyze, interpret and share complex data from a wide range of diseases and experiments,” added Lee Hartwell, Ph.D., president and director, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, and 2001 Nobel Laureate. “We look forward to exploring the potential of Amalga Life Sciences to help us understand this data in a rich and efficient way and ultimately help us meet our vision of enabling personalized medicine.”